Comment by paulpauper

In the US still, the path to success is a highly optimized one: start early, max out the extracurriculars, become an outlier among outliers. GitHub has become the new resume. No one cares that you worked at Petco at 17; they want to see your repos, your pull requests. Today's elite and top earners are not born, like under the aristocracy or nobility, but rather forged, of course assuming the potential is there, like IQ.